Imagine the unimaginable? The prospect of infinite human life is already being debated in some scientific circles. Every year steps towards this prospect happen all over the world of science. Suddenly, an Italian scientist says he will transplant a head in a few years...where could this lead humankind to? Is it even possible? The answer is yes it is possible and yes it might well happen! The ...

An excellent article in the letter from Washington by Business Day's Simon Barber, on how solar power is steadily moving to the fore. And yet antediluvian administrations all over the world - and certainly in South Africa - continue to squander vast sums on old-fashioned industrial-age technologies. We need new leadership!

We've been talking about the concept of an energy internet for some time now. A smart grid where both power generation is distributed and power consumption is collaborative. It's inevitable that as rooftop solar becomes more widespread and power utilities less powerful, that an efficient means of sharing excess power with your neighbours, and having extra power available on demand, will lower ...

More than seven years ago, we proposed a MindBullets scenario for solving the big problem of trucking fresh food into the big cities on a daily basis. Ever-increasing fuel and transport costs make this a good target for innovation. Even with the falling oil price, there are obvious benefits to growing food indoors or on roof-tops, even in artificially-lit basements. It's always organically ...

For the last couple of years the world has been running a chocolate deficit and it's probably not going to change anytime soon. At the moment, the global cacao sector is already in need of one million tons of cacao and the current projection is that we will have a shortfall of 2.2 million metric tons of ebony goodness by 2030.
It's a real multi-faceted challenge. Ivory Coast and Ghana, which produce more than 70% of the world's cacao, have been suffering from climate change-induced droughts and to ...

The first resolution to come out of the United Nations for the new year is somewhat startling. Poverty has been declared 'illegal'.
"A minimum living standard should be regarded as a basic human right," said the secretary general. "In this day and age, governments must ensure that for all their citizens, or step aside and let more competent people govern!"
Another item on the agenda is to reduce global inequality, not only within nation states, an increasingly archaic concept, but also between top ...

You may have heard us expound on the concept of precision agriculture, where drones do aerial surveys of the fields, and robots precisely manage the crop production. This trend is advancing faster than we thought. Here's a slideshow of 27 agricultural robots who have recently joined the workforce, from the enormous, specialized LettuceBot to the utility BoniRob, a lightweight field robot ...

The oil price plunge could not have come at a worse time for Russia. Just as Putin was flexing his muscles, taking back Crimea and calling the shots over gas deliveries, the value of Russia's major export commodities collapsed.
As oil more than halved in value, demand for Russia's inexhaustible natural gas also dried up. Sanctions against Russia's involvement in Ukraine were helping EU states to turn to cheap Saudi oil instead.
The ruble took an immediate pounding as Russian oligarchs sought to ...

China is leading the world in rapid construction methods, and now they are embracing 3D printed components, which are assembled to make apartment blocks and villas. They also use recycled materials in their printing process.

A really interesting perspective on the realities and problems of operating alternative energies on an existing power grid. While the Hawaiian Island of Kauai has made great strides on implementing solar power - heading towards an astonishing 80% of peak power - battery technology is not always able to cope with engineering reality. But massive investments into new battery technology are ...

There's a new brand set to dominate the consumer tech space in China, and that's Xiaomi. They're becoming the trendiest smartphone maker and soon the internet of things for their adoring fans, and that's the secret to their success.

"There is a younger generation, though, the Xiaomi generation, that has grown up in a country that has been growing by near double digits every year they have been ...

Bloomberg is picking up on something we hinted at in our MindBullet on the subject of falling oil prices. It's not just a blip in the market. There are fundamental changes underway. The longer term scenario is a shift of power and economic prosperity that was unthinkable, until now.

Few places offer a higher cost for storage of spare parts and more urgent need for "just in time" delivery than spacecraft. NASA has intelligently begun to solve both challenges by printing objects on the International Space Station (ISS). The greatest benefit is likely the ability to spontaneously create objects that no one could have thought to bring along, making the ingenuity ...

Five years ago, it would have seemed an unlikely partnership. But the alliance announced today between BHP Billiton, the world's largest mining group, and printing technology company Hewlett Packard, makes perfect sense.
And the reason? 3-D printing has gone mainstream as an industrial production technique, and HP-BHP wants to corner the market.
There's hardly an industry within which 3-D ...

The new lifestyles of the rich and famous leave luxury brands in the lurch

Dateline: 22 December 2021

The glitzy shopping mall might have been the Mecca of money in the nineties, but no more. The higher level need for amazing experiences is replacing the accumulation of bling and BMWs - for those with deep pockets at least.
There's a huge disparity when it comes to what consumers want. Millionaires and billionaires in America and Asia are no longer interested in Louis Vuitton luggage and Jaguar convertibles. Instead, the wealthy are forking out thousands for experiences they deem valuable, ...

Electric cars are doing pretty well in some urban markets, with the BMW i3 claiming to have sold 12,000 units in the last year. The market is still very fragmented, and now hydrogen fuel cell cars are making their way onto the scene. Personally I think these are the least likely to get mass adoption, but then, with the oil price dropping, perhaps a return to gasoline-electric hybrids will ...

When we published this MindBullet not even a month ago, we were pretty sure that oil would drop, but we didn't expect it to be this fast or this far. Perhaps our scenario wasn't crazy enough!

Bank of America forecasts deep structural shifts that will have profound consequences:"The free market will now set the global cost of oil, leading to a new era of wild price swings and disorderly trading ...